Acts 17: Shadowboxing with Paul
It gets better when you know all the players
I’m sure all of you have heard of Paul’s “Mars Hill Address”—that’s where Paul famously met up with the Stoics and the Epicureans in Athens. Paul had a habit of going places where he could argue with people, and it got him into a lot of trouble over the years, but in this particular instance it got a lot of other people in trouble for more than 1000 years, but that’s something we’ll get into in a minute.
If you’re not exactly clear on who the Stoics and Epicureans are, it’s not surprising. They don’t teach the classics in the public schools much anymore, largely because they’re afraid the kids will realize all these ideas they think are new and cool are just a rehash of things proposed over 2000 years ago. And if the number 2000 years ago sounds vaguely familiar, it might bring up the name of someone the public schools are decidedly NOT interested in discussing.
Paul was not just a very clever man. Yes, he studied with Gamaliel who was one of the foremost Jews who qualified as a Greek scholar of his day—so Paul would have been extremely familiar with all of the Greek philosophies—but Paul was guided by the Holy Spirit and that’s why we Christians take what he had to say very seriously. I’ve heard a lot of discussion about why Paul started his address to the Stoics and the Epicureans the way he did. More often than not we’re to picture Paul walking around the Areopagus looking for a “hook.” A “hook” is something familiar to the listener that will get them interested in what the speaker has to say. I tried to use one with my title—“Shadowboxing with Paul.” Everyone knows what “shadowboxing” is, right? Umm—right?? ... 1 Corinthians 9:26? "I do not box as one beating the air"?
Well, in this case, Paul found among all the altars to gods one small afterthought marked, “To the Unknown God.” There were probably a lot of gods honored at the Areopagus since the Greeks were among the most superstitious people in the world at the time and, again, I've heard this explained as, “Hey, you guys wanted to cover your bases so if there might be a god you didn’t know about you put up an altar just in case.” That’s one possible explanation, but there’s another I think is more plausible.
Have you heard about why Socrates was considered the wisest man in Athens? It was because he claimed he knew nothing, and the Oracle of Delphi said he was wise because he knew how much he didn’t know. Knowing your limitations is important, but this was combined with something else Plato said in his Timaeus: that the Father Creator of everything was the Unknowable One—he was so far removed from the material creation itself that anything in the created realm could not really know him. For Plato, the material realm was so far beneath the spirit realm that this Father Creator had to create lesser gods to create everything in the material realm because he couldn’t even touch anything material, and nothing bound by matter could relate to him.
It’s possible Paul was referring to this Unknowable One, because Strong's Concordance says the usage of the Greek word agnóstos as "unknown, unknowable." It’s a cinch a group of philosophers in Athens at Ye Olde Philosophy Coffee Shoppe called Mars Hill/Areopagus—a place where they gathered together for no other reason than to argue philosophy—would absolutely, 100% know what he was talking about. He’s talking about the uber-god that is above all the gods in the Greek pantheon. So Paul slyly (through the prompting of the Holy Spirit I should add) throws out some raw meat to the wolves and says, “Ya want some of this?”
What Paul was presenting was the possibility that they actually could know something they had hitherto thought to be unknowable—he was offering information about:
The Unknowable God Above All gods,
the God who created the universe and all things.
That got their attention.
• The Stoics
Now, who exactly were these two groups of philosophers? The Stoics are mentioned first, so let’s start with them. The Stoics believed that the material universe was god’s body. It’s a distant variation of Plato—and some scholars have said that just about everything in philosophy from the time of Plato to today is indeed just a variation of his ideas. Plato felt the spirit realm was so far above the material realm the material realm should be fled as quickly as possible. He called the material realm a mere shadow of the spirit realm, which is where I got my title for this paper (and you thought it was just boxing, eh?). The Stoics agreed with Plato’s pupil Aristotle that maybe the material realm had a little more meaning than that. Wouldn’t it be great, they thought, if all this universe was actually this god making a body for himself, and if he was creating his own body, absolutely everything in it would have a perfect purpose.
Well, since the god would know what he was doing when he made his own body, just like the blood has one purpose, and the brain has another purpose, and the bowels have yet another purpose rather distinct from all the others (though you’re supposed to whisper about it like that old—and I do mean old—Scott TP commercial where they whisper “toilet paper")—even those things that are unseemly still have a purpose. That’s why Paul quoted Cleanthes, who may have been quoting Aratus’ Hymn to Zeus, “Are you not all god’s children?” Everything in this universe has a place and a function, and if it was designed by this god above all gods, it all had to work like clockwork. After all, the god himself designed it for himself. So no matter what happened it was designed by this god and therefore everything that happened had to be accepted as what was supposed to be. That’s why the Stoics are famous for keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of adversity—it was just accepting the god’s will as being ordained by him and not something to be questioned. So now Paul was playing to the sympathetic side of the audience.
Just as an aside, Calvin was very enamored by Paul’s reference to Cleanthes and even did translations of Cleanthes' poetry as a result, as well as a commentary on Seneca, who was a major Stoic philosopher from the Roman Imperial Period, but I don’t think I want to get into whether Calvin was influenced by the Stoics in this particular presentation. Though the question has been raised…. =)
The other side of Paul’s audience was the Epicureans. There’s a reason why the Stoics and Epicureans would get together in that place for arguments. It’s a little like the old Monty Python skit about buying time to argue—they loved to argue and were always trying to top each other to show off how smart they were and how much they knew. Paul did remark that the Greeks love wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:22).
• The Epicureans
The Epicureans were the exact opposite of the Stoics, so the two of them had plenty to argue about. The Epicureans said that all that existed was the material realm and there was no spirit realm. Plato said the spirit realm was all that was eternal and the Epicureans said matter was all that was eternal. The Stoics said the spirit realm governed all the material realm like the turning of a wheel and that the universe ended where the body of their god ended. Anything that was not part of the god was mere nothingness. The Epicureans said that since there was no spirit realm, there was no afterlife. When the particular bits of matter that made up the body disintegrated back to their original matter, that was it. There was no soul, only nothingness apart from matter.
By the way, a couple friends of the Epicureans, Leucippus and Democritus, called these smallest bits of matter “atoms,” coupling the Greek word “toma” for divisible with the negative “a” to create “not divisible,” or a-toms. Their atomist ideas were revived in the 1500s, but that’s another story.
I’m going to fast-forward a little to how these two groups reacted to Paul’s presentation. It’s quite telling who was reacting by how they reacted.
The passage in Acts 17 tells us that when Paul got to the part about the resurrection, he immediately lost the attention of some and they scoffed at it. Those were the Epicureans and possibly a stray Platonist or two who had wandered into the conversation. The Epicureans totally rejected the idea of the spirit realm and thus the idea that there was anything to survive death, so Paul was suddenly speaking nonsense to them. The Platonists among them would have blanched at the idea that anyone would want to return to the material world after being able to escape its prison by dying. Plato said matter was the prison of the soul, created as punishment for celestial beings—those are souls with star bodies, since Plato’s god gave them the purest of matter as bodies, which is fire according to Plato—and if these souls sinned through pride they were cast down into the material realm to reside until they could earn their freedom through lives of contemplation in the path of Reason. Btw, if that sounds like works salvation, it is.
Just to tie this together with a more recent event—well, more recent than Paul’s address, anyway—the reason why the Jacobites of the French Revolution turned cathedrals into “Temples of Reason” during the Reign of Terror was because they were following Plato. Their whole Republic was an attempt to institute Plato’s Republic, but that’s another story, too.
So any Platonists in the group would have found the idea of a resurrection or returning to the prison of the soul being a good thing as utterly ridiculous. Anyone talking such nonsense was not to be entertained. It was the one thing upon which the Platonists and the Epicureans agreed. Don’t talk about resurrection.
There was also the set of folk who said they’d hear Paul again on the matter. That was likely to be some of the Stoics and a stray Platonist interested in the Unknowable One enough to overlook the resurrection part. They would be more predisposed to the idea that the material realm and the spirit realm were intertwined, anyway. The idea of recycling souls was an idea familiar to them from Hindu thought (which would have come through the silk road trade), and Plato suggested if you weren't good enough the first time you'd be reborn to try again, but that wasn’t considered a good thing.
A philosopher named Plotinus only 100 years after Paul's Mars Hill address would put the recycling part together in what was later called Neoplatonism. He called it “emanation and return.” Neoplatonism almost destroyed the church when it came into mainstream thought through the manuscripts of a man claiming to be Dionysius the Areopagite. Dionysius was one of the group that accepted the good news Paul was preaching, mentioned in the last two verses of Acts 17. He was a member of the Areopagus where these philosophers were meeting, and Paul’s message of Yahweh’s creation and answer to sin and suffering through Jesus struck his innermost longings as Truth. We don’t hear any more about Dionysius in the New Testament other than that he believed and joined Paul.
However, some 450 years later, after the church had survived the devastating onslaught of Gnosticism, which started during the time the New Testament was being written and was addressed by John and others, some manuscripts signed by "Dionysius the Areopagite" were discovered and eventually were accepted as being authentic as the same guy who was Paul’s disciple.
The bad news is that they were fake. We know this because they borrowed heavily from a Neoplatonist named Proclus, who died in 480ad, so they had to have been written shortly before they were discovered. My favorite culprit is Boethius, but some scholars think it was an Iberian, or Sanskrit, or Scythian monk who forged them, and some even speculate it was put together by a committee. The excuse is that it was common in that time to write as though you were someone else to help tell your story, but I’m convinced it was nothing more than the doctrine of demons, given the devastation it wrought. The device was a ruse to make the ideas something before Proclus, something before Plotinus, something before the Gnostics who all had been defeated after nearly sinking the ship. Taking them back to someone who could be argued as having gotten the ideas from Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, made the ideas appear to be more solid.
But that’s yet another story for another time.
Are you beginning to see why it’s so important to understand philosophy, and how dangerous it can be? This is why Paul stated clearly, “Do not be deceived by the philosophies of men,” because the Church has time and time again accepted the philosophies of men as being so important they started to bend Scripture to fit those ideas rather than using Scripture to test their ideas (1 John 4:1).
A couple rather glaring examples are Augustine and Aquinas. Augustine said all you needed to do was change a word here and there and Plato would be the same as Christianity. Aquinas said that all you needed to do was change a word or two in Aristotle and you’d have the Truth of Christianity. It became such an idol to Aquinas he decided that Reason was not fallen and it was possible to get to the Truth of Scripture with Reason and observation alone without the aid of Scripture, since he thought Aristotle had done so. This is exactly backwards. We should be reading philosophy through the filter of Scripture, not Scripture through the filter of philosophy, but we as humans are weak vessels, and we become so enamored with the notion we can arrive at all truth through our own puny abilities that we lose sight of the infinite God we serve.
I stand with Martin Luther: sola Scriptura. Scripture alone, without the embellishments of man, is the answer in season and out of season, always giving us an answer for the hope that is within us (1 Peter 3:15-16).
